In a meeting last year with the UN ambassador Susan Rice, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the special representative for Somalia, said the WFP had been withdrawn “because it had become too reliant upon al-Shabaab and its system of pay-offs”.

The WFP suspended operations in the rogue state in January last year, saying that the safety of its staff was compromised in the region.

The programme had been supporting up to a million people in the region. Dozens of aid workers have been killed in the failed state.

Al-Shabaab, an Islamic group fighting to overthrow the Somalian government, controls much of south and central Somalia and part of the capital Mogadishu, where it has imposed a form of Islamic law. Mr Ould-Abdallah said the WFP’s “way of distributing assistance didn’t function in Somalia”.